It was early morning about three years ago, and Patience Roberts was dragged out of her apartment half-naked by police in front of her crying and screaming children.

All because she had an unpaid New Jersey Transit ticket from five years before, she said.

“I was traumatized and I’m sure my kids were traumatized as well,” Roberts said as she fought back tears. “It’s police brutality, and it scars you.”

Roberts’ story was one of many told about police use of force against the black community on Thursday night at the Bethany Baptist Church in Newark.

It’s one of the first of a series of public hearings organized by the Rev. Charles Boyer, a pastor and founder of the civil rights group Salvation and Social Justice, to collect stories from residents about police brutality.

The hearings are the result of TheForce Report, a 16-month NJ Advance Media investigation published at the end of 2018, which found that black N.J. residents were three times more likely to be the subjects of police use of force than whites.

The investigation also spurred the New Jersey attorney general into hosting a series of public forums on police use of force — the first of which was held in Bridgeton in January. Boyer said the attorney general asked him to join the listening sessions, but he refused.

“I’m not that kind of black pastor,” he said. “I’m not gonna go and put my arm around you and your officers, open the doors and ask my clergy folk and the communities to embrace you.”

Among those in the crowd Thursday night was Thomas Eicher, who is leading police reform efforts as head of the attorney general’s newly formed Office of Public Integrity and Accountability. He was among the 80 or so gathered to hear the stories of several black residents, who talked in detail about their multiple, harrowing experiences with police over the course of their lives.

Thomas “Afrika” Ibiang still has the scars from when he was a teenager and a police officer grabbed his head, put it against the wall and stomped on his leg.

“When he did that, in the back of my mind, I was thinking how can he do this?” Ibiang said. “How can he do this? Where is his humanity?”

Some of the most compelling testimonies came from two black mothers whose sons were killed after interactions with police.

“They just didn’t just take my son. They took a part of me. Not just my heart, but a part of my life,” said Tawanna Graham, the mother of Jacqui Graham, who was found dead in East Orange police headquarters in 2009.

When police let her see her son’s body almost 20 days after his death, Graham found he “had bruises from head to toe.”

Both black mothers also talked about how losing their sons to police brutality has negatively impacted their health. Tawanna Graham now uses a wheelchair, and Sheila Reid said she has suffered from blood pressure problems and diabetes bad enough to need a kidney transplant.

After the hearings were done, several activists then stressed the importance of a strong civilian complaint review board for every town in order to keep police departments accountable. Civilian review boards would allow community members additional oversight of police operations so that police department would not entirely police themselves.

“If we do not have control of the police, then we don’t have democracy,” said Zayid Muhammad of Newark Communities for Accountable Policing.